China's Red Descendants dream on

If President Xi Jinping has a political base, it is comprised of fellow ''Red Descendants'' of the Chinese Communist Party's founding fathers. Many of them grew up together, suffered together, and presumed they would succeed their parents at the vanguard of the revolution.

The rise of one of their own, who understands where they come from and speaks their language, is cause for celebration.

''We are ushering in hope,'' said Hu Muying, president of the Children of Yan'an Fellowship, addressing perhaps a thousand Red Descendants in the theatre of the People's Liberation Army's August First Film Studio, in Beijing's west.

Her February address, at Spring Festival, is one starting point for divining the values and objectives that underpin the Communist Party's pursuit of dominance at home and influence abroad: what Xi calls ''the China Dream''.

Related Articles

Since taking the reins of the party and military in November, Xi has talked incessantly of the need for socialist morality and austerity. He ordered 83 million cadres to downsize their banquets and vowed to snare both ''tigers and flies'' in an anti-corruption campaign.

With less fanfare but arguably more significance, he implored cadres to show faith in and loyalty towards the party's absolute dictatorship. He held himself out as being ''man enough'' to stand up to any Gorbachev-like figure who might subvert the cause.

Advertisement

Hu Muying, 71, is the daughter of Hu Qiaomu, Chairman Mao's premier speech writer and ideological authority. She was born in Yan'an, the revolutionary bastion co-founded by Xi's father.

You will now receive updates fromBreaking News Alert

Breaking News Alert

In previous years, Hu has attacked corruption, decay and, implicitly, the party leadership. This time she recited the same list of maladies - including ''cancerous tumours everywhere'' - but applauded the ''powerful prescription'' of the new Xi administration. She implored her members to ''serve the ideals of communism'' and ''be resolute in our faith''.

''We have embraced the Year of the Snake, we have embraced hope,'' said Hu, in a section of her talk that was excluded from the authorised transcript.

Then she dimmed the lights and screened a propaganda film that underscored the ideals and faith she had in mind.

Loyalty and Betrayal, produced by the August First Film Studio, opens with a massacre of Communist Party organisers in 1927, which leads the party to establish the PLA on August 1. It then shows party leaders being lured into gambling dens and then tortured with meat cleavers and burning coals to betray their comrades. Leaders established the Central Control Commission to ensure members held the line.

An improbably handsome Mao Zedong tells his restless comrades violence is integral to the cause: ''Revolution is not a dinner party … it is a violent movement!''

He cannot transform a thoroughly corrupted system while stymying the development of an independent media, judiciary or parliament.

The chief of the new control commission proves his mettle by casting out his own turncoat brother, without flinching, as does their mother: ''You would not be my son, I would not be your mother''.

The movie ends with a loyal heroine shooting her own lover through the heart, after giving away a leader. No debate, no independent courts but probably effective.

They won the 1949 revolution owing, in part, to their extraordinary discipline and a culture of absolute loyalty to power. In moral terms, some might argue the brutal means, in an environment of civil war, were justified by the utopian destination.

Today, however, Xi's twin objectives of restoring socialist morality and securing absolute loyalty to Communist Party power stand in contradiction. Among intellectuals, his ''China Dream'' has already devolved into ''Xi Jinping is dreaming'' because he cannot transform a thoroughly corrupted system while stymying the development of an independent media, judiciary or parliament.

The hallowed control commission, renamed the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, is yet to catch any new tigers. And if it does, a cynical public might presume the motive was political or the evidence contrived because most officials are presumed to be corrupt and confessions extracted by torture.

So far, all the commission has caught is flies, like the Wenzhou official who died last week after a month in custody with his body scarred, battered and starved. This week it was a Henan court official with bruises covering his lifeless face.

Sixty-three years have passed since the end of the civil war and 37 years since China's utopian delusions were entombed with Chairman Mao. What may have been arguable for the founding fathers, in the age of revolution, is unedifying for their children.

The party's external enemy has had to evolve into a hostile west which deploys weapons like ''universal values'' to subvert the Communist Party system via means of ''peaceful evolution''.

''Can we watch the realm, established by the bloody sacrifice of our fathers, be lost by peaceful evolution? We cannot!'' Hu told her new year's crowd.

And the utopian destination grows ever more amorphous and elusive. ''We shall prove by our own actions that we, the children of veterans, are indeed worthy of the name 'Red Descendants','' Hu said. ''Let's strive together towards the China Dream!''